PROSE

Selected Nonfiction

Poetry Magazine

"To Cross the Distance”
Winner of Poetry Magazine’s Editors Prize for Feature Article

"We talk of the seeming normalcy of a river in terrain split by the word border. How when one interrogates it, some bodies are free to move in space while darker bodies, even if fleeing for their lives, are held to a limit. We talk of words encoding the bodies they cover: how a difference of language—you, them, nosotros, nuestro—can delineate what a body is allowed to freight from one lyrical line to another, bank to riverbank. And despite everything, the body remains.

How brutal how whitespace can turn the word be from auxiliary verb to a state of being: things that cannot be.

We read together, down the page: There are certain things that cannot be/Undone. Past the margin, the resolution of the sentence feels as unyielding as that which cannot exist—there are things we can do from which we can never come back—and though for most of us English is not our first tongue, we bob and roll in the violence of the language: ‘Undone. Lot’s wife glanced back at Sodom as she was.;"

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Lit Hub

"On Borders, Whitespace and Saying the Unsayable: A poem's virtue is in its lament against powerlessness"

"In Oakhurst, we’re driving fast, laughing and singing when a herd of deer gallop wildly, softly across the road before the truck in front of us hits one. We pull over, rush to his slumped body.

The act of his breathing ripples his fur, his eye large and wet, his horns just nubs. Each breath is too slow, too measurable. There is only a small patch of blood under his left shoulder, but he is dying.

Afraid of his kick, I only touch him after, say sorry as I stroke him. In the smallest space in which death cleaves from life, the sound of any word stings."

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World Literature Today

"What to Read Now"

“Borders, often confused for boundaries, are first imagined by groups who insist power over geographies that surpass such insistence. So limits are invented into rivers and forests, divisions fastened to latitudes. The political borders we talk of are intervened into existence but can widen into very real pained places, can be writ into us like “an imaginary line etched / the length of her,” as Celeste Adame writes,”

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Selected Articles / Reviews

Selected Interviews

The Academy of American Poets (poets.org)

w/ Tara Jayakar

 

On editing the March 2021 month of poems for the Poem-a-Day series for poets.org

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Fresno State’s MFA Program

w/ Jefferson Beavers

On how to write a thesis, or first book of poems. Interview as an alumna of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at California State University, Fresno.

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Lone Star Literary

w/ Kay Ellington

“The thing that first struck me about El Paso, because I brought to it my body born from the tropics, is how much the body aches for water here. And too the ferocious beauty of this desert, where flowers on cacti bloom from among thorns. The people of El Paso–Juárez, my friends, students, and colleagues, are that fierce and that fervent too.

And over time one develops a relationship with the wind here, which can blow up to forty miles an hour, or which can stop airplanes from descending, can turn rain into falling mud, or land into sandstorm: can shift the landscape here, in just seconds, from one form into another. That’s a very rich thing to witness as an artist and as a scholar, when the land itself is always suggesting newness, possibility.”

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How a Poem Happens

w/ Brian Brodeur

“In his essay “My Grandfather's Tackle Box: The Limits of Memory-Driven Poetry,” Billy Collins writes: “[e]ven a poem based on a past event can give off a feeling of immediacy if it manages to convey an awareness that it exists in the present tense of its own unfolding—an awareness, ultimately, of its own language.” Meaning, if we are to leap in a poem beyond the first stirrings, or scene, into something larger than the first perception, it has to be through a concrete present that leaps by sonic and imagistic intuition into a new territory.”

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